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“Organs looted from our
sons”: Palestinians accuse the Israeli army of selling the organs of
its victims

Donald Boström

Editorial Note:
This article is
translated from the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet by Donna
Anziner. (Seeherefor the original article.) It
has provoked angry denials from Israel. Boström has stated
to the government-run Israeli radio that
"It concerns me, to the extent that I want [Palestinian
accusations of IDF theft of organs for harvesting] to be investigated, that’s
true. ... But whether it’s true or not — I have no idea, I have no clue.” The
logic of the article is as follows: the recent arrest of Levy Izhak
Rosenbaum for illegal organ trade
in connection to other arrests among prominent figures in an Orthodox Jewish
community in the US; Israel's record of needing organs for transplanting;
Israel's record of ignoring international conventions on illegal organ trade;
long term complaints by Palestinians about Israeli practices of harvesting
organs from Palestinians; his own experience as a witness to an incident in
1992; the Israeli practice of performing autopsies on murdered Palestinians in
the absence of compelling reasons and against the wishes of the Palestinians;
returning the bodies sewed up, followed by immediate burial under Israeli
supervision.

This is a powerful circumstantial case and in
our opinion warrants an international investigation. See also Alison Weir's
powerful article on this topic.

August, 17, 2009

"I am what you can call a 'matchmaker'”, said Levy Izhak Rosenbaum from
Brooklyn, USA, in a secret recording by an FBI-agent whom he believed to be a
client. Ten days later, at the end of July this year, Rosenbaum was arrested in
connection with a massive corruption ring uncovered in New Jersey: rabbis,
congressmen and entrusted officials had for years been busy with money
laundering and the illegal organ trade, which now
ended up like a Sopranosepisode.Rosenbaum’s
matchmaking had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with buying and
selling, on the black market, kidneys from Israel.
According to his own statements, he buys organs from
poor people in Israel for
$10,000 and sells them back to
desperate patients in the US for $160,000. The legal waiting period for kidneys
is nine years on average.

The accusations have shaken the American
transplant industry. Should this be true, it would be the first timeorgan trafficking has
been documented in the US, according to experts
cited by the newspaper New
Jersey
Real-Time News.

On the question of how many
organs were sold, Rosenbaum says: "Quite a lot." And he boasts,
"I have never failed." His business was carried
out over a very long period of time.

Francis Delmonici, a
professor in transplant surgery at Harvard, and member of the Board at the
National Kidney Foundation’s Board of Directors, is quoted
in the same newspaper, saying that the same type
of organ trafficking which takes place in Israel, also
takes place in other parts of the world. Delmonici says that
of the 63,000 kidney transplants in the world,
approximately 10% are illegal.

Hot countries for that
type of illegal trade are Pakistan, the Philippines and China, where it
is believed that organs are taken from executed prisoners. But strong suspicion
also exists in Palestine, where people believe
that their young men, captured as prisoners, have, as in
China and Pakistan, been
taken as organ donors and that they were later executed. This
is a very serious allegation that raises so many
questions, that the ICJ, International Court of Justice, should absolutely open
an investigation over the possibility of war crimes
perpetrated by Israel.

Israel has time and again been at the forefront of
criticism when it comes to its unethical way of handling
organs and transplants. Countries like France have suspended their cooperation on organs with Israel since the beginning of the 90s, and the Jerusalem Post wrote:”Other countries in Europe are expected to follow France’s example
shortly”.

Half of the new kidneys
that Israelis have received since the beginning of the year 2000 have been
illegally bought from Turkey,
Eastern Europe or South America. The Israeli
health-care authorities have a complete knowledge of the activity, but do
nothing to stop it. In 2003, at a conference, it was revealed that
Israel is the only western country
where doctors do not condemn the illegal trade of organs or take any legal
measures against doctors who have conducted such illegal operations. To the contrary, according to Dagens Nyheter (December 5, 2003), the Chief Doctors of the largest hospitals are involved in
the majority of illegal transplant cases, .

In an attempt to fill
the need for organs in the country, Israel’s then health minister, Ehud Olmert, ordered a large campaign
in the summer of 1992, to get the Israeli population to come forward as organ
donors. One half million pamphlets were distributed to local newspapers where
citizens were encouraged to write to donate their organs after their death. Ehud
Olmert was the first to write his name down.

Only a couple of weeks
later, the Jerusalem Post wrote that
the campaign had been very successful. Not less than 35 000 persons had
enrolled, when usually it’s about 500 a month. In the same article, the
journalist Judy Siegel, wrote that
the gap between offer and demand was still extensive. 500 persons were queuing
for a kidney transplant, but only 124 could receive surgery. Out of 45 persons
in need of a new liver, only three had a chance to get an operation in
Israel.

At the same time when that
campaign was going on, young Palestinians were
disappearing and were being returned at night to
their villages, five days later, dead and ripped up.

The story of the ripped
up bodies terrified the populations in Gaza and
the West Bank. There was a story of a dramatic
increase of young men’s disappearance, with the subsequent nightly funerals of
autopsied young men.

I was in the area working on a book when I was contacted several times by UN staff members who were worried about the situation. Those who contacted me said that the
theft of organs indeed took place, but that there was nothing they could do. On
assignment for a TV company, I traveled around and spoke with a great number of
Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza, who declared that their sons had been
robbed of their organs before they were killed. One of the examples I came
across on that gruesome journey was the young stone thrower Bilal Achmed Ghanan.

It was close to midnight
when the sound of the engines of cars coming from the
Israeli military column was heard in the outskirts of the small village called
Imatin on the northern part of the West Bank.
The two thousand villagers were awake and stood silently, shadowed in the dark. Some
were posted on the roofs, others behind their curtains, houses or trees that
could give them protection in the darkness under the curfew but could give them
a good view over what would become the cemetery for the
village’s first martyr. The military had cut off all electrical power around the
village and the area was restricted to the military —
not a single cat could move outside without risking its life. The darkness’
numbing silence was only broken by quiet sobbing, and I don’t remember if we
were shivering because of the cold or because of the suspense. Five days
earlier, on May 13th, 1992, an Israeli special force unit had waited in an
ambush at the village’s carpentry shop. The person the
special forces were looking for was the young
19-yearold Bilal Achmed Ghanan, whom they had
orders to neutralize, as he was one those active young
Palestinians who rendered the Israeli occupation forces’ lives miserable by
throwing stones.

Bilal Ghanan was one of
the leading stone throwers and had been on the wanted list for a couple of
years. This meant that he and other wanted stone throwing boys lived under the
bare sky up in the NablusMountains. To
be captured implied death and all the stories about previous torture scenes did
not improve things. So they remained in the mountains. But for one reason or
another, Bilal came down from the mountains one day and
wandered unprotected into the village, passing the
carpenter’s house on that unlucky day in mid-May. Why he did come down on that
particular day, not even Talal, his older brother, could
say. Perhaps there was a lack of food and they were
short of supplies.

Young
Palestinians throw stones and glass bottles against Israeli soldiers in the
northern part of the West
Bank. In that area Bilal Achmed Ghanan was shot and
slit wide open at the hospital.“Our sons are used as spare organs”, say
Palestinians.Photo: Donald Boström

Everything happened according
to plans for the Israeli Special Forces unit. They stubbed out their cigarettes,
took away the cans of Coca Cola and took aim calmly and quietly through the
broken window. When Bilal was near enough, they only
had to squeeze the trigger. He got shot
the first time in the chest. According to the villagers who witnessed the
incident, he was also shot after that, once in each leg. After which, two
soldiers ran out from the carpentry shop
and shot him twice in the stomach.
Finally, they took Bilal by the feet and dragged him down the 20 steps of stone
of the carpentry. The villagers also say that afterwards, people from the UN and the Red
Crescent who happened to be in the area and had heard the shots came to take care of the
wounded.

The discussion over who would
take care of the victim ended when the Israeli forces took charge of the badly
hurt Bilal, loaded him into a jeep and drove away to the village’s outskirts.
There waited a military helicopter that took Bilal away to an unknown
destination.

Five days later, he was
back in the darkness, dead and wrapped up in green hospital cloths. When the
military column, that had come to get Bilal from the autopsy center Abu Kabir
outside Tel Aviv, stopped by the place where Bilal would
be placed to rest, someone recognized the Israeli
military leader by the name of Captain Yahya. In the dark, a
person whispered “The worst of them all” in my ear. After Captain Yahya’s
men had unloaded the body and exchanged the green cloth for a light colored
cotton cloth, a few male relatives were picked up to complete the job by digging earth and mixing
cement.

Together with the sharp sound
of the spades, some laughs were heard on the part of the soldiers who waited to
go home as they exchanged jokes with each other. When Bilal was lowered down to the
ground, his
chest was exposed and it became suddenly clear to those who were present what
type of abuse he had been subjected to. Bilal was by no means the first person who was
buried with a stitched up body from the stomach to the neck, but speculation about
the purpose jumpstarted.

Bilal Achmed Ghanan, 19 years old, was shot and taken by Israeli soldiers. His
body was later returned stitched up again from belly to
neck.Photo: Donald
Boström

The victimized
Palestinian families on the West Bank and Gaza were convinced of what had happened to
their sons. "Our sons are used as unwilling organ
donors," said the relatives of Khaled from Nablus to
me. The same went with Raed from Jenin and the cousins
to Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who all disappeared over a number of days and
had returned at night, dead and autopsied.

Why would they keep their
bodies up to five days before we can bury them? What happened to the bodies
during that
time? And why were they autopsied when the cause of death was evident, and in all
cases, against our will? And why are the areas closed by the military
during the
funeral? And why is the electrical power cut off?

Nafe's uncle had many questions and he was very
upset. The relatives of the killed
Palestinian men did not have any doubts any longer.

The spokesman for the Israeli
army said that, on the contrary, the allegations of organ theft were fabrications by the
Palestinians. He claimed that all the Palestinians who were killed were routinely
autopsied.

Bilal Achmed Ghanem was
one of the 133 Palestinians who were killed in various
ways that year. According to Palestinian statistics, the reasons of death were
as follows:shot in the street, explosion, battery, teargas, intentionally run over by a car, hanged in prison, shot
at school, killed in the house, etc. Of those 133 assassinated persons of all
ages from four months to 88 years old, 69 were autopsied, which is to say half
of the dead. The routine autopsies carried out on dead Palestinians, as the army spokesman said, do not
match the reality in the occupied areas. The questions remain.

We know that there is a great
need for organs in Israel. And we know that there is a widespread illegal organ trade under
way, that it has been going on for a long time, that it takes place with the
blessing of the authorities, and that high-level doctors in the
largest hospitals and officials at different levels also take part in it. And we
know that Palestinian young men disappeared, that they were returned five days
later under mysterious circumstances at night, ripped up and stitched back.

The time has come to
bring to light this macabre activity, to reveal what is going on and what has
happened in the territories occupied by Israel since the beginning of the
Intifada.

Donald Boström
is a journalist, photographer and writer of the documentary book Inshallah
(Published by Ordfront 2003).